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Mozilla to Develop Mobile Firefox
Kelson writes "Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions). The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but 'has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.'"
Is it really necessary to consult a chart to make sense of their products?
"Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3."
So 2 is after 1.9, but is also after 3. But it's Firefox 3. But the product named Mozilla, the suite, stopped at 1.7.X, and was replaced by Seamonkey 1.0, which is really Mozilla 1.8.
Anybody?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
I've been running MicroB on the Nokia N800 and it now handles pretty much any ajax site I throw at it. I had problems with many ajax sites using Opera 9, not to mention Minimo, but MicroB handles them nicely. Not many extensions available yet though.
Check out MicroB, a mozilla-based browser for the Maemo platform on the N800. I prefer it to the default Opera-based browser that the N800 ships with. It's based on Gecko 1.9.
The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites.
A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.
I've used mobile versions of Opera, InternetExplorer, Minimo, and now Safari (and a few other off-brand browsers). Up until Safari, I found Opera to be the best for mobile browsing, but even it was lacking. The iPhone's Safari seems pretty good so far, still not perfect, but better then the rest. But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch). Hopefully this new development from Mozilla will offer a nice high quality mobile browser that is compatible with multiple devices. I'm looking forward to a browser war for the mobile market, its about time we got a choice of good quality browsers instead of being stuck with low grade versions that can't even render simple pages well.
Let the browsers wars start again.
Perhaps (time, not reading the article), but there's another important player here that should be blatantly obvious, but no one has mentioned. That is of course Mozilla Foundation's best friend, Google. In particular, their emphasis on mobile platforms and Gphone. Guess what browser the gphone will have. In any case, there'll be a good deal of leverage and motivation from Google to make this happen sometime soon.
Tamarin has very little to nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with massively cutting back on XPCOM usage within the codebase and other architectural changes which couldn't be made in a 1.x build for compatibility reasons.
In fact, Tamarin currently needs a fair amount of optimization to reach parity with Spidermonkey (in the case of untyped data anyway).